[meteorite-list] NASA Downsizes, Slows Dawn Mission To Near Halt

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Nov 9 14:18:48 2005
Message-ID: <200511091917.jA9JHN109613_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_3196914

NASA downsizes, slows Dawn mission to near halt
By Kimm Groshong
Pasadena Star News
November 9, 2005

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE - NASA has slowed development of Jet Propulsion
Laboratory's Dawn mission, cutting the project's budget, shuffling
employees and pushing back the scheduled June 2006 launch date.

Selected as a Discovery Program mission in 2001, Dawn is designed to
orbit two asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter - Vesta in July
2010 and Ceres in August 2014.

Chris Russell, the mission's principal investigator and a professor of
geophysics at UCLA, said he was shocked by NASA's recent request that
Dawn "stand down."

"They basically said that we should slow down or almost stop the
development while they decide to take a look at it and make an
investigation," Russell said. "They got concerned by the number of
problems that they saw that we were having."

Tom Fraschetti, Dawn's project manager at JPL, said the problems largely
arose in the development of Dawn's ion propulsion system.

The Deep Space-1 mission, launched in 1998, proved the ion propulsion
system as a technology demonstration. But Dawn would be the first
science mission to use the system.

"We have to be sure that it has the reliability to last
10 years," Fraschetti said. The team has used the same drawings to build
the system, but, he said, "the electronics module actually wasn't
packaged in a way that it was easily reproduced. That made it very
difficult" and delayed the system's completion.

Fraschetti said it's reasonable for NASA to be giving the project more
scrutiny. But, he added, "as a project, we're not jumping for joy over it."

Russell said the good news is that Dawn's launch window is unusually
forgiving. The spacecraft could launch anytime through the middle of
2007 and still arrive at its destinations on schedule. In fact, he said,
the team was already thinking about pushing back the launch date.

"There should be no impact on science as long as NASA doesn't lose its
will to do this mission," he said.

Russell said he feels as though the team had been running a race and
then suddenly was told to stop to finish the race another day.

"It's really disappointing to have this happen," he said. "We were going
full bore. You lose a lot of momentum, and it will be difficult to get
that momentum back."

Fraschetti said JPL's Dawn team has shrunk from about
75 people to 25 since the stand- down. He said most, if not all, of the
50 who had been working on Dawn have been reassigned to other projects
at the lab. Russell said similar employee shifts have occurred at
Orbital Sciences Corp., the Virginia-based company developing the
spacecraft.

The investigators will have their first meeting with Dawn's project team
Monday and the investigation report is expected around Jan. 20.

"I'm very confident we will launch this," Fraschetti said.

Scientists hope to learn more about the early solar system and the
processes that formed the rocky planets billions of years ago by
studying Vesta and Ceres, two leftovers from the process that look very
different from one another. Dawn, originally designed as a
$373 million project, would be the first mission to orbit two separate
planetary bodies.
Received on Wed 09 Nov 2005 02:17:22 PM PST